RF Manipulations for Higher Brightness LHC-Type Beams

In order to increase the transverse brightness of beams for the LHC, ever more complicated RF manipulations have been proposed in the PS machine to reduce the intensity demands per PS batch on the upstream PS Booster. Several schemes based on cascades of batch compression, bunch merging, as well as the more routine bunch splitting have been successfully commissioned and higher brightness beams have been delivered to the downstream accelerators for measurement. Despite all this complexity, longitudinal and transverse beam quality are well preserved. In addition, to profit fully from the brightness of all four PS Booster rings, the injection of twice 4 bunches into harmonic 9 buckets in the PS has been made operational as an alternative to the usual double-batch transfer of 4 + 2 bunches into harmonic 7. This paper summarizes the new beam production schemes, their implementation in the PS low-level RF system and the experimental results..